One Drop Hardens into Heaven and Four Rivers

Click for full size

The Middle Drop

On the second day there was water above and water below and nothing between them except more water. Then the word came, "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the water" (Genesis 1:6), and the middle drop congealed. Not a continent. One drop, hardening in the center of the mass, and out of that single bead came the lower heavens and the highest heavens.

Rav said the heavens had been made the day before but made damp, the way clay is damp when it comes off the wheel. So "let there be a firmament" meant let the thing set. Rabbi Yehuda bar Simon heard a hammer in the word instead, since the root that gives rakia is the root in the flattened sheets of gold beaten out for the sanctuary, gold worked thin under a mallet until it will hold a shape and stay in it.

Rabbi Hanina put fire into it. Fire came out from on high and went over the surface of the firmament and dried it, and Rabbi Yudan ben Shimon said the same fire burnished the surface while it passed, the way a smith brings up a shine on what he has just finished.

The Verse Rabbi Yohanan Would Not Pass

Rabbi Yohanan could not get through a line in Job without stopping. "With His wind the heavens are enhanced" (Job 26:13). Every time he reached it he halted and said the same thing out loud to whoever was in the room with him: Rabbi Hanina taught me well.

Whatever set it, the result was a lid. Above it the upper water, underneath it everything else, and the arrangement held because a drop had been told to stop being liquid.

A River That Came Out of Delight

Under the new lid, water behaved itself. A river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it parted and became four heads (Genesis 2:10). Philo, working in Alexandria while Rome ran the docks, would not take Adin for a place on a map. He heard delight in the name. The river came out of delight, and it came out as one thing before it came out as four, a single goodness dividing into Pishon and Gihon and Tigris and Euphrates the way one virtue divides into the particular decencies practiced in the countries downstream.

Two of those four rivers still run past cities a person can name.

The Night the Windows Opened

What hardens can also be opened. In the six hundredth year of Noah's life the windows of that firmament came open and the springs of the deep came up from underneath, and the two waters that had been held apart since the second day got at each other across the whole world.

They took the fields and the houses and the animals and everyone who had ever argued about any of it. When the water finally went down there was mud where the fields had been, and the mud had a smell, and nothing walked on it that had not come off the boat.

Stones on Wet Ground

Noah came out onto ground that had only just stopped being seabed. Nobody had told him what to do next. The instructions had covered the wood and the pitch, the animals, the measurements and the days, and then they stopped, because there was no command for the morning after.

He looked up first. The sky over him was shut and ordinary and holding, the same lid that had opened once and been closed again, and it gave no sign either way. He stood in it long enough for the water to come up around the sides of his feet. Behind him the animals were going down the ramp and out across the mud, and nobody was directing them anymore.

Then he started carrying stones. He stacked them and laid the offering on them and lit it, and no verse had asked him for any of it. Fear could account for that, and so could habit, and a man newly off a boat has reason enough for both. But a man who has watched the whole earth drown and come back up knows what a closed sky is worth, and he was not going to wait to be told to say so.

The fat caught. Smoke came up off the stones, thinned as it climbed, and flattened out along the underside of a vault that had once been one drop of water.